


A home where no body goes

by jhalya



Category: Sicario (Movies)
Genre: Emotional Trauma, F/M, Gen, I'm possibly overtagging, Nothing too explicit, Recovery, but hey, but it's good to be on the safe side, it's sicario, mention of drugs, mentions of gore, mentions of past violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-06-28 11:42:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15706527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jhalya/pseuds/jhalya
Summary: In the aftermath, the body recovers but the soul is troubled. Alejandro, Kate and Carina find themselves and each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Part 1: Numb**

* * *

 

 **Alejandro** : “ _But would you leave me / If I told you what I’ve done / And would you leave me / If I told you what I’ve become / ‘Cause it’s so easy to say it to a crowd / But it’s so hard, my love / To say it to you out loud_ ” (Florence Welch - No Light, No Light, from _Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry_ )

 

* * *

 

 

His wife had always complained that he wasn’t an easy person to shop for.

So every holiday and birthday and special occasion, he’d kiss her on her pretty lips and tell her she’d given him the best gift of all.

Her love. 

Her devotion.

Their daughter.

But she’d still wanted to get him something nice for Christmas.

 

So that one Christmas - their last, the only one he remembers, where they’re safe and hale and _whole -_ alongside the presents for his wife and daughter, there is also something for him.

 

‘You always drink out of those horrible plastic cups. Cheap coffee, cheap cups. No one should live like that’, his wife had said, laughing at his clumsy attempts to unwrap the shiny thermos cup.

 

_I’ll make your coffee every morning, Papa. And you can take it to work with you._

Alejandro had touched his chin and kissed his daughter on the forehead.

_Thank you._

_My treasure._

Now, he sips water through a straw and _wills_ the pain away.

He can’t even remember what happened with that cup.

And there’s no one to blame for his memories fading.

No one, but himself.

Alejandro pops another painkiller and falls into his troubled sleep.

* * *

 

 **Isabel** : “ _No more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world_ ” (Florence Welch - Blinding, from _Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry_ )

 

* * *

 

 

Ben makes her smoothies every morning that leave a bitter taste in her mouth. Jen does yoga and runs and promises her a puppy if she’s good.

_Good, good, good._

And Carina is good. A good little girl to good little parents.

 

Now, Ben and Jen are nice enough, like permanently smiling cardboard figures. Blank and boring and safe.

_You’re going to be safe. We need you safe. You’ll be safe._

But she doesn’t feel safe. She doesn’t feel much of anything anymore.

 

Sometimes, Jen takes her out in the backyard, to _get some sun, honey._

She doesn’t like the sun though. The sun over the deep green woods is gentler than the harsh desert sun, but Carrie - Carina Jenkins - wants to forget.

They didn’t have to tell her - _this is your life now, this is your truth -_ she’d wanted to.

Needed to.

Forget.

The house beyond the border, the baby, the grieving father - the man who saved her. The man who died. Shot like a dog. She’d wanted to forget.

 

Carrie goes with Jen to the backyard, but sits on the porch. In the shadows, where the sun and the desert of her broken memories can’t touch her.

On the shadowed porch, Carrie doesn’t even register the needle taking Isabel Reyes further and further away from her.

Doesn’t feel a thing.

* * *

 

 **Kate** : “ _I look around but I can’t find you / If only I could see your face / I start rushing towards the skyline / I wish that  could just be brave / I must become a lion hearted girl / ready for a fight / Before I make the final sacrifice_ ” (Florence Welch - Rabbit Heart, from _Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry_ )

 

* * *

 

There are truths that make up one’s life that are hard to swallow.

 **Truth number one** : the will to live is stronger than anything, principles be damned.

Kate used to have a problem with that, used to hate herself for it. How easily she gave in. That even before she felt the cold kiss of the gun, she had already given in to a pair of sad, sad eyes and to hands that had saved and damned her all with one touch.

 

In the aftermath, in the wake of Alejandro’s retreating shadow, lumbering away from her parking lot,  she felt like she’d been robbed of more than her morals. She’d been robbed of _her identity._ She felt as if what burdened Alejandro’s steps, what grounded the ghost, was _Kate herself_. And what was left, the shell of her former self, the _non-Kate_ , wasn’t worth much of anything at all.

 

Dave and the job were easy to leave - Reggie less so. He’d refused to let that _doughy prick_ mess with her career, her hard work, with _her._

Like a child, he’d tail her - _what happened, what happened, what happened?_

 

The tunnels were easy to write off. Alejandro in her kitchen, Alejandro and his gentle hands, Alejandro and his killer eyes, that shit still scared her. And Reggie did not need a scared little girl busting doors to corpse-filled houses and getting him killed.

 

Reggie sort of gets  his way eventually. The Bureau has her looking for missing persons in Wyoming - it’s cold enough and far enough to please the ghost of Alejandro, who nods approvingly from the dark corner of Kate’s mind that it now occupies.

_Don’t punish yourself for what those assholes did. Kate, this isn’t your fault._

Oh, but it is. She signed the paper.

Kate doesn’t pack a thing and leaves. She’ll pick something on the way.

 

 **Truth number two** : hate is much easier to feel. It is effortless. But love… Love hurts.

 

It haunts her, what Reggie said.

_Those assholes. Those pricks. Those motherfuckers._

Matt, she understands - he’s the hustler, the man who says what he needs to be said to get things done. He’ll make deals with devils and play the part - any part: the moron with a shark’s smile, the shark with a gun at the ready, stepping over bodies in disposable footwear because the pool of blood he leaves behind is that deep.

 

It will come to bite him in the ass eventually. Matt is a soldier, a good little one, and as any good little soldier, he answers to other people - _people  elected to office, not appointed to it_ , like Dave used to say -  and they will betray him, discard him like he discarded her.

 

Kate may have walked away with her life, but Matt knows too much, _is_ too much to be silenced by another man’s grief when death and retribution come knocking at his door.

Kate almost wishes she was there when that happens, because there is a part of her that is as mean and petty as the worst of them.

 

In all fairness, Matt doesn’t trouble her that much - apart from the very objective fact that he is an asshole and a man and Kate’s dealt with enough of those in her line of work to last her several lifetimes. The fact that he is physically stronger than her even at the height of her passion and aggressiveness doesn’t help much either. But Kate has enough time on her hands now - sleep doesn’t come easily or at all - so she hits the gym and does yoga and keeps her body busy, hoping the buzz of a punishing workout will silence the wailing in her brain. Wyoming is good for that. The weather shapes and sculpts her body more fiercely than any personal trainer at the local gym ever could.

 

She’s well into her third month of her new posting when it happens - the event that triggers the birth of the second truth that now defines her existence.

 

Wyoming doesn’t get the spring memo - mountains are still covered in snow and snow storms slither in and out of the little town she’s stationed in before blasting roads apart. This is as good time as any to catch up on the paperwork and make the Bureau happy.

 

So Kate wades not through dead bodies hidden in sun-burnt Arizona walls but through cases so old, even the ghosts of those poor missing souls have been forgotten. She composes statistics, accepts the pitying looks and the bad coffee and works herself to numbness to the backdrop of howling winds and rattling windows.

 

Until there is a victim. A body lost in the snow.

 

In retrospect, it’s one of Kate’s poorer decisions. She splits up from her liaison - who knows the mountain better - because the storm is coming and they have a lot of ground to cover. Kate has a nose for dead bodies - they follow her everywhere. She doesn’t need tracks in the snow or winds whispering secrets to her. If anything, the spirits lead her straight to them. She is sure footed on the snow and she finds the body first.

The mountain finds her second.

 

Kate doesn’t remember much of the _minutes, hours, days_ she spent with a half eaten corpse, a mountain lion trapped between steel jaws and her own mangled leg.

The sheriff she was assigned to is not a religious man, but he crosses himself near her hospital bed and kisses her softly on the forehead, with the reverence you pay to sacred relics.

_There is a spell around you, Katie. The dead protect you._

Kate doesn’t need pills to sleep that night - she cries herself unconscious instead.

Because, oh, how right he is.

She thinks of Alejandro’s little girl disappearing into a vat of acid, thinks of Alejandro’s wife ripped to pieces and defiled, thinks of the rage and hatred that has shaped Alejandro into the man who’d put a gun to her head and taken her innocence from her, and then thinks of the hands that had murdered children but had not murdered her.

 

Sadly, the flame of hatred she had nurtured all these long months after she took aim and didn’t fire sputters and dies.

 

Kate leaves Wyoming feeling numb - not because she’s high on pain meds for her leg, but because there is now something else other than _hatred_ settling fretfully in her chest, burning from behind her breast. She dares not wake it.

 

 **Truth number 3** : Alejandro may have violated her _innocence_ and plundered her moral high ground,  but he has not murdered her _goodness_. One day, Kate will know what to do with this gift.

 

But not today.

Not today. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I've no idea where this is going - actually, I do, but right now, I'm playing connecting the dots. Also, if any of you are familiar with The Killing, do not be surprised to see a character make an appearance :)

 Part 2: Burning

‘ _Seems that I have been held, in some dreaming state_

_A tourist in the waking world, never quite awake_

_No kiss, no gentle word could wake me from my slumber_

_Until I realise that it was you who held me under_ ’

(Florence Welch - Blinding, from _Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry_ )

* * *

 

_It’s autumn in the world outside his dreams, but not here. Here, on this beach, it is forever summer. The sun warms his face and the sky is as endlessly blue as the sea lapping gently at his feet. There are sounds of happiness all around him. It is silent, yes, but it is the silence of his home: the wind blows through his wife’s long hair and the air hums with the birdlike movements of his daughter’s hands. He opens his eyes and, in the distance, two fluttering figures dance around a sandcastle. He waits. They will call to him, as they always do, as they always have - wrenching him out of his work, keeping the nightmares at bay, with a cool, soothing hand and the silent laughter of  the child that could not hear his voice, but could always hear his thoughts._

_He waits on these blue shores, but the figures - they no longer call to him. Further and further away they drift, dancing in the golden glow of a long forgotten sun._

_It’s autumn and he is alone._

* * *

It’s autumn and school is in. Carrie fits in right away - she was always good at this, making people like her. She’s smart enough to not fall behind, but cool enough not be a nerd. Plus, she’s got a mean right hook and a bit of an attitude.

 

That’s when the problems start.

 

It’s small stuff at first. The smoke of her first cigarette warms her to the depths of her soul. She even refuses to cough it out when the smoke sandpapers her throat, the inside of her nose. Practice. All good things come with practice. And she gets a lot of that.

 

Ben and Jen are easy to fool - they don’t care. They say they do, but they are as fake as the men who abducted her long ago. The only difference is that Ben and Jen are alive, and those men are…

 

Carina takes another drag out of her cigarette and forgets.

* * *

Kate fires her chief deputy and assistant chief within the first three days after her election, which was a mercifully  brief affair, quickly sorted out by flattering posters - which Kate despised, but Reggie and her mother have framed in their respective houses - the mayor’s endorsement - who Kate also despises, mostly because she’s pretty sure Mayor Call-Me-Jim can barely remember her name on most days, but could pick her ass out from a sea of thousands - and Ray being an old friend of Dave’s.

 

“This is no good way to get yourself re-elected, Kate”, Ray cautions.

“Good.”

Re-election is not what keeps Kate up at night.

 

Ray thinks Kate is unhinged and un-ready, but Now-Sheriff Macer is done ‘soaking everything in’ and ‘being there to learn’ and if Ray has a problem with that, he can go bitch to his buddy, Dave, once he’s done settling himself down in his shitty ass condo in Florida. She itches to tell him that every time he calls, but she doesn’t. She remembers all too clearly what happened the last time she threw a tantrum - hell, she still carries the marks, twin wounds below her breast, close to her heart.

 

This time, she isn’t going to go cry to _daddy_ , for the time of fathers is long gone. Hers, she dares not think of and Alejandro… well, sometimes, Kate wonders what kind of daughter she reminded Alejandro of. At the end of a long day, when she looks at her reflection in the mirror, she thinks of Alejandro’s daughter and cries. Kate would wager that, if empathy can truly poison the brain, hers is pickled in venom.

 

(Dave Jennings settles in his chair with a glass of bourbon while Kate gingerly sits down on the couch with her soda. Her leg is healing well and the doc’s given her a clean bill of health. She handed in her resignation from the Bureau along with it, which is probably why she’s now here.

“My buddy, Ray, up north, was just telling me he was retiring. Might need someone to take his place.”

Kate has always liked Dave, so she strives to be polite (Reggie complains that she’s so brusque these days). “I’m out, Dave. But thanks.”

“You’re too young to be out, Kate. Too good. Now, now, let me finish. This’s a nice place, Kate. And Ray’s been a sheriff for many years. Small town, soccer moms and all that. Perfect place to kick back and  find yourself.”

 

Kate does not bother to correct Dave - that you don’t always like what you find, so it’s best to stop looking. He knows her well, after all. Kate’s a thumper. She breaks down doors to the land of wolves and corpses because she _needs_ to know. So, Kate takes the job because she needs to know if Dave’ll ever stop fathering her if she does. Three months later she gets a star-shaped badge and a congratulatory email and never hears from Dave again. Problem solved.)

 

Kate’s down to interviewing her twentieth candidate when Holder comes strutting in, all height and bones and secret drug problems, she can just tell. He’s got quick and clever eyes and a nice smile, but who doesn’t?

 

Kate waits until he’s arranged his long limbs in the chair in front of her and then decides she likes his unassuming posture. For such a large man, he takes up very little space - he doesn’t exactly wilt under her Full Metal Bitch stare (yeah, she’s heard the gossip, she knows what she goes by around here), but there’s a certain meekness about him that doesn’t really fit his cocky entrance.

 

Kate’s surprisingly okay with that. This isn’t Arizona, this isn’t Juarez, where houses are lined up with death and explosives. Everyone knows the address to the local meth lab. She’s strong enough to break up a couple of bar fights a week and with a bit of luck, Holder will never have to flash anything else but a badge and his pearly whites to get his way.

 

Holder hands in a copy of his application and is all _ma’ams_ and _thank yous_ as Kate quizzes him on random points from his resume. Last nineteen men she’d seen had either leered, sneered or scoffed at her and their corny jokes had made her uncomfortable - not because she didn’t get them, but because she now automatically assumes they’re hiding something: _guns, plots, death._

What Holder tries to hide is written in the lines of his face and the cloudy blue of his eyes. So, Kate decides to cut to the chase.

“Okay then, Stephen, level with me. Coke?” Kate has no idea why she asked that when she knows the truth - she forgets how far the border really is from here.

 

In his chair across from her, Holder seems to shrink, but he braves her eyes nonetheless.

“Meth. Been clean 8 months now, though.”

“Any identifying marks?”

“Cross on my back and Serenity in my heart, but no gang signs, ma’am, no.”

“Why’d you quit?”

Holder smiles again and Kate gets a shiver. He smiles a father’s smile.

“My kid got old enough to hate me and there was another on the way. I didn’t want to turn into a monster for the children I helped bring into the world.”

 

Kate reaches for her drawer and pulls out a shiny gold star. For a moment, she thinks of how little it means to her now that she knows the rivers of blood and mountain of corpses it’s built out of, but for the man in front of her it might mean the world. And his world can still be clean. His children need not ever know how close the monsters really are. How much damage their kind eyes and gentle hands can do.

 

Kate tosses Holder the badge and signals Miriam from front desk to come in.

“Congratulations, Deputy Holder. Now, let’s see if we can find you an uniform that fits.”

Holder clutches the badge to his chest and tries to scramble out of his chair at the same time.

“I won’t let you down, ma’am.”

Kate almost says _don’t let your children down_ , but nods silently instead.

Her voice - it has long been gone.

* * *

_There is a house on the shore of his dreams. A white house, with wide open doors and windows. There are white curtains billowing in the breeze. He remembers those curtains from a dream outside of his dreams. He remembers the shape of the woman behind the curtains - a bruised and battered silhouette with porcelain fine skin and eyes as blue as the sun-kissed sea. He remembers warmth that he extinguished with the cold press of a gun and this isn’t a memory that he treasures, not one he chooses to bring with him here, on the shores of his dreams.  Unforgivable things he’s done, lives  he’s taken or destroyed,  seem meaningless when you walk univited into the soul of another with dirty feet._

_But here it is, the  house on the shore of his dreams. If he turns around, he can see a white bed past the billowing curtains. He has no memory of this woman - of Kate, sleeping on sheets of white satin. Only the dead follow him here and he walked away from her with her soul, but not with her life. That, he has gifted her with. A life to make her stronger in a world where she could be weak and frail and so, so beautiful..._

_Kate is alive here and in the real world as well and wouldn’t she laugh at him now? At the assassin trapped between two worlds, awake only to feel pain, asleep only to feel remorse?_

_Alejandro turns around and looks out into the distance, past the white curtains of the white house, at the bed where Kate is sleeping with her back to him, always so foolish, always so trusting._

_He knows she would not laugh though. He will only ever have her tears, her blue eyes  sorrowful, wanting, waiting for a glimpse of the soul he forgot he had. A soul he’s not sure he still has._

_Kate is sleeping in his white house, in his white bed and for a moment, Alejandro doesn’t feel so alone anymore._

* * *

Carina cannot explain it.

They make her angry, these jokes. The constant wanking.

_That tight ass, d’ya see that? I’d tap that in a heartbeat._

_Think she likes it rough? Fuck her blind, man._

_Whip out them ‘cuffs, Sheriff Katie._

It’s everywhere at school these days.

 

Sheriff Katie moves in the house next door and Jen wrinkles her nose, while Ben blends his smoothies a little harder. (Carina’s only been in school for a couple of months, but Jen insists on breakfasts and dinners together. She packs her lunch every day, but Carina never eats it. Food tastes funny these days.)

 

People talk around the block about Sheriff Katie and the big, empty house she moved in.

_No husband, no kids, no family. What’d she need that big house for?_

Ben and Jen talk about her during dinner.

_She’s not going to last long._

Carina excuses herself and takes her upset tummy to bed.

 

It’s not the food that upsets her - it’s Ben, it’s Jen, and Mr. and Mrs. Hancock from across the street and the boys at school.

 

It’s Sheriff Katie moving in a big, empty house and not giving a fuck about Ben and Jen and the Hancocks and the boys in her school, walking tall, untouched and untouchable, like in a dream.

 

It’s Sheriff Katie and her blue eyes and blonde hair she watched her dye all by herself on a Wednesday night and that small smile she has every time they meet.

 

Sheriff Katie is a beacon of light, burning bright, burning Carina’s cardboard world to the ground. Like a moth drawn to the flame, Carina follows her new neighbour day in and day out, basking in Sheriff Katie’s obliviousness. From her bedroom window on the second floor, Carina can see Kate Macer stop being Sheriff for the precious hours she allows herself to sleep. Carina should feel like a perv, watching this one woman’s life, like a cheap peep-show, except there is nothing cheap about the clean, quiet life of Kate Macer. 

 

There are no locked doors in the house next to Carina’s  and the light is always on - that light that always looks so inviting and halos around Sheriff Katie’s tightly bound hair whenever she’s in the kitchen, drinking milk straight from the bottle.

 

She’s seen Sheriff Katie in T-shirts so worn they’re probably older the sin - uglier too, but Carina’s never seen Sheriff Katie with her hair down, not even at home. Carina would also like to inform Mr and Mrs Hancock that Sheriff Katie’s big, empty house is so neat and tidy you could eat off the floor - something Joyce and Howard, who have lost their housekeeper because they're assholes, could not do on their dining room table.

 

There is something comforting in watching Sheriff Katie live a solitary life, an insulated life, a life of cold lights and late night dinners for one, because there is more warmth there than in a her own big, empty house, where Ben and Jen look at her pityingly. Carina sometimes dreams that she is the wind tearing down Sheriff Katie’s home, whipping her hair free. In her dreams, Carina’s wails are a roar.

_See me, see me.  
_

_Call out my name.  
_

_Save me._

* * *

 

_She is his daughter, most beautiful when frail._

_She is his wife, the sun of his life, so bright it burns him._

_She is himself, an extension of his soul, the mirror image of everything he fought for, all those years, in all those courts._

_She is sleeping in his white bed, in the white house of his dreams._

_His house is on fire._

* * *

Alejandro wakes.

* * *

 

_‘I’m sorry if you_

_couldn’t find_

_me_

_I have been_

_In the_

_woods._

_I put myself_

_there because_

_I couldn’t be good._

_I have been_

_running with_

_foxes and_

_hunting with crows._

_And I have_

_found myself_

_a home_

_where no body goes.’_

(Florence Welch - _Useless Magic, Lyrics and Poetry)_

**Author's Note:**

> Right, so I left the theatre with a mighty need for Kate to come in and fix everything, because this little psychofuck family needs a group hug. Then I discovered the greatest book there is - Useless Magic by our lord and saviour Florence Welch - and it was chock-full of Kate x Alejandro feelings, it's unreal. Adding to this a month of reading and re-reading every piece of Sicario fiction there is, I decided that Kate x Alejandro needed to make a comeback. In my mind, I have great plans for this. In reality, updates might be long coming. But the need to continue this is strong!
> 
> So let me know if you enjoyed and... happy reading... I guess :)
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at https://www.tumblr.com/blog/jhalya


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